ChaosCast #1 – It’s My WAR And You’ll Bleed If I Want You To

June 2, 2008

One of the best perks of doing this blog is making new friends who share the same hobby. After a *really* late night on Saturday, Keen (of Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog), Snafzg (of The Greenskin) and myself stumbled our way through recording our very first Warhammer podcast, which we’re calling ChaosCast.

What’s ChaosCast? It’s our attempt at bridging the WAR blog community together, even if in a small way. Sure, it’s fun writing about these subjects in our blogs, but sometimes we need to hunker down in hunter-gatherer herds and hash things out as friends chatting.

It’s a bit of a long first podcast, as we had a lot to go over, but future ChaosCasts — we’re aiming for one every two or three weeks — will be shorter and contain 90% more karaoke. If there’s anything you’d like us to discuss in the show, just leave a comment on this post.

Hope you enjoy!

(Special thanks to Snazfg for doing the incredible music intro, and for Keen working up the graphic and setting up the podcast hosting. I just showed up and used my mouth to make sounds.)

Nice podcast, it was interesting to listen to. 🙂 My only criticism is that the music came in too soon and too loud at some points, but that’s it. 🙂

Do you have any ideas on what Mythic could do to keep content fresh and new without raising the level cap for expansions? There’s only one game I’ve played that’s done that (somewhat) – Final Fantasy XI has had 5 expansions, and none of them has raised the level cap. There’s a heavy focus on story in that game though, so the new content is mostly a whole new storyline to play through, as well as new leveling areas (because there are so many different classes, you’ll want to level up as many as you can on a character), new endgame content (though they were slightly backward in their endgame content development), and new sets of armor to obtain that may or may not be better than the old stuff (for example, the armor might be only better for using a certain ability). However, I don’t think a lot of that would be viable for a game like Warhammer – the story is not really as central, I’m assuming that you can’t change your gear in combat, so there’s no need for multiple gear sets in the sense having sets for specific abilites, and you’re only going to level up your character once (whereas in XI you’d level up classes on the same character).

I think it would be really difficult for Mythic to develop an expansion without raising the level cap, though they could do things like introducing 2 new races (and so 8 classes, and 2 new cities – meaning 2 new places for end game content), perhaps new trophies and tome unlocks, new scenarios – but beyond that, I’m not sure what else they could do. For most MMOs, half the game is leveling up, so to not have that would be a large loss of content.

Now for another question: what classes are you all most interested in and how difficult do you think it will be for Mythic to balance all 24 classes? Do you think they’ll be balanced in the sense that if it was 1vs1, any class vs any class, it would come down to gear and skill? Or do you think their balancing may be focused toward group play and group dynamics?

@Spinks – Yup, I even said so up in the blog post there. The first show was a bit long to let us get our footing and cover the newsletter in detail. We actually edited it down from about a 2 hour runtime. Future podcasts will be about 30-45 min.

WAAAGH! is a Warhammer Online blog written by Syp, a casual-hardcore player, and is dedicated to chewing the fat about WAR's various features, the culture, the news and how Orcs can eat with such a pronounced underbite.